Ranked list
The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Club music taken apart and reassembled by people who kept the volume and dropped the function: the Night Slugs and Fade to Mind axis, the Janus and PAN circles, the producers who came through grime and dubstep into abstraction, and the pop records that borrowed the vocabulary and gave something back. 2010 to now. Techno, IDM and dubstep have their own lists.
Deconstructed club was coined by critics rather than producers and has been resented ever since, mostly by people who point out that they were making club records and the deconstruction was in the listening. The complaint is fair. The term is also the only one that gathers this music into a single place, so it is used here without enthusiasm.
What holds the field together is not a sound. Arca, Errorsmith, Jam City, Amnesia Scanner and Lotic have very little in common at the level of texture. What they share is a relationship to the dancefloor: these are records made from club materials, at club tempos, by people who DJ, and they are not built to work in a club. That gap is the subject rather than a failure of execution.
The other thing they share is a moment. Almost everything here arrives between 2012 and 2020, when a group of producers scattered across London, Berlin, New York, Shanghai and Kampala found each other through the internet rather than through a scene, and built something that behaved like a scene anyway. Nobody was in the same room. That is audible in the records.
The ten
- Number 1 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
SOPHIE — Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides2018
№ 20 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Everything synthesised, nothing sampled, and a record that runs from a ballad to industrial noise without ever sounding like a range being demonstrated. The most consequential electronic album of its decade and the one most obviously ahead of the rest.
Why it is number one
Sophie Xeon spent years making pop that sounded like it had been extruded rather than played, and then made the record where the method stopped being a joke about artifice and became a way of saying something true. Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides is built almost entirely from synthesis: no samples to hide behind, every sound constructed, and the two extremes of the record are a ballad and something close to industrial noise. Immaterial and Faceshopping make the argument that a body can be built rather than inherited, and the production makes the same argument at the level of sound. Very little in electronic music has ever had this much at stake in how it was made. Her death in 2021 has not changed the record's standing so much as made clear how far ahead of everything it was.
- Number 2 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Arca — Xen2014
№ 16 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Alejandra Ghersi breaking club rhythm into something wet and jointed, with a body at the centre of it rather than a floor. It arrived with almost no precedent and half the decade after it is a response.
- Number 3 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Jam City — Classical Curves2012
№ 116 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Chrome surfaces, empty lobbies and corporate sheen, made in London for Night Slugs. It turned out an entire scene had been waiting for permission, and the records that followed spent years working inside the terms Jack Latham set here.
- Number 4 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Lotic — Power2018
№ 176 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Menace and grace in the same bar, made in Berlin by a producer from Houston who treats fragility and violence as the same material. The Janus parties produced nothing else this complete.
- Number 5 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Errorsmith — Superlative Fatigue2017
Erik Wiegand builds his own instruments and it shows: every sound here is unfamiliar and every rhythm is cheerful. The rare record in this field that is genuinely fun without being any less strange.
- Number 6 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Amnesia Scanner — Another Life2018
Corroded pop delivered by a synthetic voice through a wall of distortion. It sounds like a broadcast from an institution that has stopped being maintained, which was the point and has aged into prophecy.
- Number 7 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Jlin — Black Origami2017
Footwork abstracted until the genre is a memory and what remains is pure rhythmic architecture, built by a former steel-mill worker from Gary, Indiana with no interest in anyone's scene. It sits at the edge of this page and belongs on it, because the deconstruction here goes further than anywhere else in the field.
- Number 8 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
M.E.S.H. — Piteous Gate2015
James Whipple assembling sound design that behaves like architecture, on PAN, with almost no drums where you expect them. Cold and dense in a way the rest of the field seldom risks.
- Number 9 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Fatima Al Qadiri — Asiatisch2014
An imagined China assembled from Western misreadings of it, built on grime's rhythmic skeleton and a Sinogrime vocabulary. Conceptually sharper than anything else here and it works without the concept.
- Number 10 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Yves Tumor — Safe in the Hands of Love2018
The record where this scene's methods collide with rock and neither wins. Noise, soul and pop structures held together by nerve, and the moment several people in this field realised the abstraction had somewhere else to go.
Eleven to twenty
Ranked, and held to the same rules as the ten.
- Number 11 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Elysia Crampton — American Drift2015
Geology, Bolivian history and a lurching dembow, arranged into something closer to an essay than a set. Crampton made the field's most ambitious argument about what a club record could carry, and it loses its place in the ten to a record that carries the argument further rather than better.
- Number 12 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Arca — Mutant2015
№ 27 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Longer and more formless than Xen, and for some people the better record. It sprawls where Xen strikes.
- Number 13 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Rabit — Communion2015
№ 128 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Grime hollowed out into something ceremonial, all gunshots and silence. Texan, and almost nobody else attempted the comparison.
- Number 14 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Aisha Devi — DNA Feelings2018
Devotional electronics with a voice processed past recognition. Closer to ritual than to club music and it keeps the tempo anyway.
- Number 15 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Nkisi — 7 Directions2019
Congolese rhythm structures at brutal speed, made in London. The most rhythmically single-minded record here.
- Number 16 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Holly Herndon — PROTO2019
An AI trained on an ensemble, singing with them. The concept could have swallowed the record and the choir keeps it human.
- Number 17 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Chino Amobi — Paradiso2017
A dystopian travelogue with a cast of collaborators, and the NON label's fullest statement.
- Number 18 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Klein — Only2016
South London gospel and family recordings put through a shredder. The least polished thing here and the most affecting.
- Number 19 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Ziúr — U Feel Anything?2017
№ 240 on The 250 Best Electronic Albums of the 21st Century
Broken and bright at once, with more humanity in it than most of the circle managed.
- Number 20 on The 10 Best Experimental and Deconstructed Club Albums
Eartheater — Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin2020
Harp, voice and processing, and the record where the field's abstraction turns pastoral.
Near misses
Records considered and not ranked, with the reason each fell short.
Total Freedom — the mixesNot eligible
Ashland Mines is one of the most influential figures in this entire field and has never released an album. The catalogue is DJ mixes, edits and club tools, which a canon built on albums cannot reach at all.
Coucou Chloe / Object Blue / LSDXOXO / Toxe and four others — various EPsNot eligible
Eight records considered for this page turned out to be EPs and were removed for that reason alone. This tradition's natural unit is the EP, and its absence from a top ten is a fact about the format rule rather than about the producers.
Kelela — Cut 4 MeNot eligible
A mixtape rather than an album, and one of the records that built the bridge between this scene and pop. Ineligible and impossible to ignore.
Oneohtrix Point Never — Garden of Delete
Adjacent rather than inside. Lopatin was working the same seam and arrived from a different direction, and Replica ranks on the 21st-century canon already.
Sinjin Hawke / Zora Jones — Vicious Circles
Fractal Fantasy renders club music as digital sculpture, visuals included. Just outside on depth rather than on ambition.
Actress — Ghettoville
The record that declared club music dead and released the ashes. It belongs to the 21st-century canon at 24 and to a slightly earlier conversation than this one.
How this list was built
Ten from 310 records considered, running from 2010 to last year. The field took in Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, Janus, PAN, NON, Halcyon Veil and the pop records that came out of the same circles, because this scene was assembled online across five continents and a list drawn from one city would describe almost none of it.
This is the youngest tradition ranked on the site and the one that least often makes albums. Its natural unit is the EP, the mixtape, the edit pack and the club tool, and a great deal of the defining work arrived that way. Eight records considered here turned out to be EPs and were removed on format alone, and Total Freedom, one of the most influential figures in the field, has no album at all. That is not a gap in the research. It is what happens when a canon built on albums is pointed at a scene that does not centre them, and the near misses name the most conspicuous cases rather than letting a reader conclude the page has not heard of them. SOPHIE and Kelela are ranked and named on the same terms as everyone else here, and the pop-facing records in the pool were judged that way throughout. The traffic between this scene and pop production ran both ways from the start, and treating those records as visitors would misdescribe how the music actually developed.
Every experimental / deconstructed club record on this site, ranked within its own canon rather than against each other, is on the experimental / deconstructed club genre page.